Russian tourists arriving in Pyongyang - Western visitors had been restricted to special economic zones (Kim Won-jin/AFP via Getty Images)

The North Korea tourist trap

The border opened to foreign visitors for only a month before being sealed again. North Korean troops in Russia might be the reason.

Khang Vu

20 March 20254 min read

Having closed the country even more tightly during the Covid pandemic, last month North Korea put out the welcome sign for a small group of foreign tourists from Australia, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Canada for the first time since 2020. Yet the gates slammed shut again last week when Pyongyang announced it would grant no new tourism visas. Visitors from Russia had been allowed in since February 2024, but Chinese nationals, once North Korea’s main source of foreign tourists, have still not returned.

The abrupt closure raised eyebrows, considering that North Korea’s Kim Jong-un has invested in key tourism facilities in Mount Chilbo, Mount Paektu, Mount Kumgang, and the Wonsan-Kalma resort area in preparation for the post-lockdown rebound in foreign visitors. North Korea intends to use the money from tourism to raise funds, and while delays in reopening after the pandemic lockdown came about due to concerns over the spread of anti-socialist behaviours by foreign tourists, North Korea resolved the problem by limiting their access to a politically insulated special economic zone. And back before the border closure, the country welcomed Westerners to its capital generally without incident.

Non-Russian tourists had been granted access only to the Rason Special Economic Zone in the northeast, which did not feature any significant landmarks compared to Pyongyang. Rason is also close to the Russia-China-North Korea tripoint border allowing for easy ground transportation from China and Russia.

But the monetary value of foreign tourism to North Korea has crashed compared to before 2020. Due to international sanctions, foreign tourism was one of the few legal channels through which North Korea could earn foreign currency. As such, the country looked to capitalise on its charm offensive in 2018 and 2019 to boost its tourism industry, with the number of foreign tourists almost quadrupling from 100,000 in 2014 to 350,000 in 2019. Kim even granted unprecedented permission for a reality TV show, The Amazing Race Vietnam 2019, to be filmed in North Korea.

The monetary gains of sending troops to Russia far outweigh the gains of welcoming back foreign tourists.

Russia’s war in Ukraine has fundamentally changed how North Korea makes foreign currency. Pyongyang is estimated to have made US$175 million from foreign tourists in 2019. However, Russia’s purchases of North Korean war materiel have earned the country as much as US$5.5 billion since 2023. Russia hiring North Korean troops is projected to earn it up to US$572 million each year. Some observers even equated the economic impact of South Korea sending troops to South Vietnam, which fuelled the South’s “Miracle on the Han River” in the 1960s and 1970s, to North Korea sending troops to Russia.

However, North Korea sending troops to Russia is not without risks to its socio-political stability. Based on accounts from North Korean prisoners of war, North Korean troops and their families were not informed beforehand that they would be sent to fight Ukraine. These troops also received orders to commit suicide to avoid capture. Most of these troops are only sons, and their deaths were kept secret from their families back home to avoid having to publicise battlefield casualties. Improper commemorations to these fallen soldiers to maintain secrecy, which include abandoning their bodies in Russia, could fuel resentment towards the regime. As North Korea is sending a new wave of troops to make up for 4,000 casualties, the need to insulate the home front from the battlefront is even more urgent.

North Korea thus feared that foreign tourists would spread the news about these battlefield deaths and new waves of deployment among locals. North Korea sent a new wave of troops just as they welcomed back Western tourists. With families already relying on word-of-mouth to find out the whereabouts of their loved ones, the information that the non-Russian foreign tourists shared could quickly spread. This is not a far-fetched scenario, as one tourist from a recent trip to Rason wrote that he wished for “world peace” during a visit to North Korea-Russia Friendship House, and upset his host.

As the monetary gains of sending troops to Russia far outweigh the gains of welcoming back foreign tourists, North Korea made the choice to prioritise the former, even though it had invested in upgrading tourism facilities. The country did not foresee the war in Ukraine and Russia’s need for weapons and troops when it restarted work on building resorts in 2022. After the first month of reopening, the limits on foreign tourists to Rason were probably not enough to assure North Korean leaders that the involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war would be kept secret. Rason is also only five kilometres from Rajin Port, where foreign intelligence analysts suspect North Korean troops boarded their ships to travel to Dunai Port in Russia.

Western tourists had certainly shared information about the outside world with North Koreans before, but the information was not as damaging to the regime as that about North Korean soldiers in Russia. The more troops North Korea sends to Russia, the unlikelier it is going to reopen itself to foreign tourists.

About the author

Khang Vu

Khang Vu is a visiting scholar in the Political Science Department at Boston College.

Topics

North Korea